Shades of meaning

Ian Doescher
Ian Doescher is the director of nonprofit marketing at Pivot Group, a marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at ian@askpivot.com.

It’s my privilege to work with a team of talented designers. One of them — Rachel Getsinger, Pivot’s senior design lead — takes the lead on many of our logo and branding projects. Recently, she has introduced Color Theory 101 to our clients when we present logo color options. In this month’s article, I’m passing Rachel’s knowledge and wisdom on to you!

What do you know about your colors? Is your experience with
color limited — as mine is — to playing with Crayola crayons as a kid?

As it turns out, colors have meaning. The colors you use can
evoke different emotions based on our shared cultural understanding of
different colors. Here is a quick guide to colors, beginning with various words
each color evokes and a few additional tips:

Red: Corporate, passion, energy, active, leadership, hot, courage, unyielding. Red is a strong color — red splashes tend to be where the human eye goes first. Too much red can be overwhelming, but in just the right amount, it’s a great attention-grabber.

Orange: High energy, lively, joy, enthusiasm, creativity, determination, encouragement, stimulation. With such positive words associated with orange, is it any surprise orange has experienced a newfound popularity in the last 10–15 years?

Yellow: Warm, cheerful, on sale, humor, friendly. Yellow isn’t frequently used in marketing, but it can add bright splashes — it’s a bold color to use.

Green: Harmony, fresh, fertility, money, safety, healing, health, peace. Green is, of course, a natural color to use in the world of plants and trees, and generally has connotations of well-being.

Blue: Stable, trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, truth, calm, depth, understanding. Blue is a very strong and traditional color, as this list suggests, but because that’s true, it is often overused.

Purple: Power, stability, royal, noble, ambitious, dignity, independence. In contrast to blue, purple is a color identified with many powerful emotions, but is not overused. In fact, if anything, purple is probably the second-most underused color after yellow.

Black: Elegance, power, formal, mystery, classic, authority. Black is a bold color that almost immediately puts a more formal spin on any marketing piece, particularly when it’s used as a background color.

White: Pure, honest, faith, simple, clean. The reason we often talk about having sufficient white space in marketing is that white helps the eye feel like marketing materials aren’t overly cluttered. Apple takes this to an extreme in much of their marketing (so much white!) to emphasize simplicity.

Of course, this is just
the beginning of the infinite world of color. (This also only covers the eight
colors you’d find in the smallest Crayola pack — there’s a world of shades out
there.)

Knowing the meaning of different colors doesn’t necessarily mean you
should use them all at once. You shouldn’t.

Pivot generally gives
clients a color palette of about four to six colors — one or two primary colors
and a handful of complementary accent colors. More than that, and it will be
hard for your customers to see the similarities from piece to piece, and your
brand won’t feel consistent.

Most large companies stake
out a color and run with it. Think of some of the largest companies in the
world, and you know what colors goes with them: Coke’s iconic red, Amazon’s
orange, and so on.

Or, consider the largest
cell phone carriers, which each stake out a different color territory. Verizon
has claimed red, Sprint is yellow, AT&T is blue, and T-Mobile has gone bold
with pink. They may each have a few accent colors, but by and large they stick
with their primary color. It’s a good practice — that’s why the largest
companies do it.

What do I want you to take
from this article? These two things.

First, know what the
colors you are using mean. Second, try using only two or three colors in your
marketing materials (the same two or three in each piece) and see the
difference it makes in terms of consistency.